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5.21.2012

DIY Screen Printing from Zip Screens™

Check out my rocker chick! We DIY screen printed her shirt with the help of Zip Screens which were sent to me thanks to my friend Katherine at Sew Woodsy. She introduced me to FashionArtProjects.com and they sent me some cool stuff. Check it out.

Can you imagine the size of a 4-year-old girl's eyes when packages full of sparkle glitter paint arrive in the mail? And then, I tell her "this is to paint your clothes". Bad idea. We had to paint immediately for I feared she might explode with excitement. Lucky for us, kid #2 was sleeping and the back porch wasn't too full of toys. Time to craft. My assistant is ready.

First step was to raid her drawers for some clothes to jazz up. We found two T-shirts ripe for something funky. One pink, one green.

Next I cut up the Cheerios box to slide inside the shirts so the paint didn't bleed through.

Then, she picked her design. The packages I got came with several to choose from. She picked "rocker chick"... oh yeah. It's pretty much like a huge sticker and the design is cut out but with a mesh or "screen" holding everything together. Peel off the sticker from it's clear backing.

Stick it on your shirt (or whatever you're painting). The directions recommend adding tape around the outsides of the screen/sticker, but we didn't and had no problems.

Choose your paint. I gently nudged her into using white since it would show up the best on the green shirt.

Smush and drag the paint across the screen using the attached scraper card thingy. :)

Once that was done a very whiney convincing voice asked (over and over and over again) if we could add pink and purple on top.

We did, and I think this was our one mistake. Since we took the time to open two more paints after the white paint was already applied, and then smush those paints around, the white had dried quite a bit. When we went to take the screen/sticker off the shirt, some of the paint came with it. Good thing for us the shirt was supposed to look worn and edgy.

It just looks a little more worn and edgy now : ) She loves it and tells everyone, "I made this shirt!".

Here's shirt #2 in the making. With this one we did the white first and took the sticker off immediately. Then, once it was fairly dry, she used a paint brush to add sparkle purple on top. Worked much better.

Sparkle-tastic.

I would definitely use Zip Screens again. Kaley absolutely loved doing this project and thinks it's so cool she can wear her artwork. This would be a good project for a kid birthday party too... nice take home gift for the kiddies. You can buy Zip Screens at Walmart. Happy crafting.

Disclaimer: I was provided Zip Screens and the paint free of charge however, I was not compensated to write this post and my opinions are my own. :)